Comedies

PREFACE

although no year, or even a month, can pass at this time without something new being contributed to these studies, and the readings of the manuscript of Turnebus recently discovered have taught a surprising amount about the proarchetype of the Palatine recension, nevertheless the Teubner and Weidmann editions are not of the kind that they easily leave a place for a third. The matter having been examined for a long time, it finally pleased me that in this edition I should summon Palaeography as a helper to Philology, especially since not so long ago in a booklet published in London ('Introduction to Latin Textual Emendation, based on the Text of Plautus,' Macmillan, 1896) I had gathered the common corruptions in Plautine manuscripts and explained their causes; and it seemed that by this method the emendation of the Plautine text might perhaps be advanced somewhat. For that saying of Cobet is excellent:

'There is in manuscripts... a certain consistency of error, and they are accustomed to commit the same mistakes about the same things, and the more of this kind one either finds himself or has ready at hand from the discoveries of another, the more prepared he approaches the finding of the truth.'

I wish to heaven that all or most editions of ancient writers had their own companion booklet, in which, more fully than can be done within the space of a few pages of a preface, it could be narrated what vicissitudes those writings had experienced, how many and what kinds of forms of writing they had assumed time and again, what changes they had received from monastic scribes or correctors or scribes, whether by design or by chance; for if I am not mistaken, corruptions would be emended more easily and more surely. But let other editors look to other writers. The Plautine text has certainly followed a path so simple and so easy to know that we both can and must always place before our eyes to what errors correctors and scribes were repeatedly most prone.1 For example, allow me here to warn once, so that there is not excessive repetition in the annotation, that some scribe or other

1: These errors I have arranged in my booklet in such a way that in the first chapter I have treated those which arose from bad emendation, and in chapter II those from trans-